


wrought into flesh and bones

by The-Immortal-Moon (LunaKat)



Series: Of Gearheaded Geeks and Alchemy Freaks (EdWin Week 2019) [2]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Body Image, EdWin Week 2019, F/M, Pining, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-16 02:26:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18682243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaKat/pseuds/The-Immortal-Moon
Summary: For EdWin Week 2019. Day 2: ScarsWinry has never struck Ed as the type to care for aesthetics unless it’s automail-related, and for the most part, she holds true to that.





	wrought into flesh and bones

Winry has never struck Ed as the type to care for aesthetics unless it’s automail-related, and for the most part, she holds true to that. The only time he’s ever heard her compliment or disparage something based upon its physical appearance is a machine. If it fits her definition of “glorious”, she’ll gush about it for hours upon hours—but if she finds something dissatisfying and flawed, usually by virtue of incompetence from whoever built it, then it leaves her ranting to the heavens in righteous indignation.

(Like in Rush Valley, when she alternatively gushed over the prosthetics on display or gaped openly while demanding aloud how  _anyone_  thought this was a good idea. She actually got into it with another mechanic one time, then dragged Ed over to display his automail, and she boasted to the onlookers that his limbs were her proudest achievement. Her  _proudest_  achievement.)

For this reason, it takes a long time for Ed to finally convince himself that she has reason to care about him beyond the hunks of wires and steel strapped into his place where his limbs used to be. Longer still to convince himself that she doesn’t mind just how broken and damaged his body has become over the years, over wearing himself ragged searching for a way to return Al to his flesh body. All that effort, and in return, the years of violence and struggle and serving under the state as a military dog, as a potential weapon of war and mayhem, have left their marks upon him.

(He could tell she was furious when he made his intentions clear. Why she didn’t outright threaten to refuse helping him with the surgery, when he—at least, in her eyes—so clearly planned to throw his life away, is beyond him. Still she helped, did her best to reassure him through the haze of utter agony. She helped him stand again.)

Now, for the record, Ed doesn’t consider himself overly vain. It’s never been a luxury he can afford. Sure, he maintains care for his hair almost religiously (a guilty... vice? is that a proper word for it?) and he’ll blow up over slights against his stature, but that’s the extent to which he cares deeply or adamantly about his appearance.

(She  _loves_  to tease him. It’s practically a pastime for her to flaunt how much more vertically inclined she is compared to him, and she like to ruffle his hair like he’s her kid brother or something. It drives him _crazy_. ...but then she helps him braid his hair and she makes every effort to keep from tugging. She once said she was lowkey jealous of his hair—which may or may not have dissuaded him from cutting it short again.)

Still, at the very least he considers himself traditionally attractive—his jaw sharpens as he gets older, his eyes are intense enough to draw attention, his shoulders are starting to fill out, he has a more or less appealing musculature. Hell, he even gets  _taller_  ( _finally_ , it  _happens_ , even if it doesn’t come in a sudden shot and Al still towers over him, taller is taller). He’s not so oblivious to not have noticed the occasional interested glance in his direction, not that he ever really gives it much thought beyond an eyeroll and then doing his best to disregard it.

(At the Central station on their way down south, Ed caught another couple glancing their way, caught the woman sighing to her partner about how adorable young love is. They were gone before Ed could get properly flustered, much less object to the false assumption. He doesn’t think Winry heard them, too amped about Rush Valley and all its promises.

...he wonders how she would have reacted.)

It’s not as though anyone would be that interested if they knew what was underneath. If they knew the scars that slashed their way across his stumps, evidence of the initial amputation and then the procedure to install his automail ports. Thick, ropy dark-pink tissue circles the junction between flesh and steel, rough and jagged and hardly flattering as it stretches across his skin in discolored swathes. It’s worse around his arm, because during the rehabilitation, he came dangerously close to dehiscence a few times.

(Winry always scolded him, back then. “You’re going to make it worse,” she’d say, and when that didn’t work, she followed up with, “You’re going to kill yourself.” But what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger—even if it leaves a mark, which probably what she was really trying to say, and he just hadn’t listened.)

Sometimes, on the rare moments when he’s alone, Ed will run his fingertips over the thick, puckered flesh that loops its way around his shoulder, around the mechanism that now serves as his arm. The skin there is hardened from the trauma of being torn apart, and the sensation of touch is less sensitive that it was before. Sometimes he runs his thumb over the narrow strip that extends to where a screw is bolted into the bone, sitting just beneath his clavicle. The shift from human to machine is hardly a seamless transition.

(Before she’d even start with maintenance, Winry always checked the scarring for signs of an infection. It was strange how, beneath her fingertips, the flesh became strangely sensitive. He’d bite the inside of his cheek when she ran her hands over the back of his shoulder blade, feeling the heat of her searching gaze on him.)

Even if the arm is where the worst of the scarring is, it’s not the only place. The jagged markings around his leg are just as painful a reminder. It’s one he’s less inclined to display, too, even if it’s not quite as horrific. Simply, the difference is that he gave up his arm, but his leg was taken. Something about the forcefulness of the loss made him wish to treat that particular stump more tenderly, even before Al admitted that he wished to restore Ed’s lost limbs in addition to his own body. Ed never examines those scars—they’re more shameful, and he would rather shutter them away, rather hide them beneath long pants because it’s not a declaration of war against the world, not like his arm. It’s just a reminder that he was so stupid in the first place.

(“It looks like it’s healing well,” Winry said the last time he reluctantly returned to Risembool, because last time the port was oozing and it turned out it was infected. It’s not now, and he crosses his arms and refuses to look her was as she critically analyzes the lip of the port, where the scar tissue has grown over it and subsumed it and claimed it as a permanent part of him.)

And then there are the marks he’s accrued over the years. Slashes and scrapes that crisscross his torso, his remaining limbs, the length of his back and shoulders and collarbone. A pink mark blooms on his flesh shoulder where some nutjob managed to make contact with a blade. There’s a chemical burn on the small of his back from a mission early in his career, mostly faded but still there. Faded lacerations mark his flesh arm, some nicks and quite a few slashes. Even his remaining leg has scratches and scrapes from when he was young and trained on Yock Island, evidence of where brambles clawed at his calves as he raced through the wilderness chasing rabbits. His elbow retains a childhood injury where he skinned it open, left it bleeding so profusely that he was almost convinced he was going to die.

(When he takes his shirt off, he’s distantly conscious of the fact that her gaze scans his torso in search of new marks, new evidence of danger and near-death and one close call too many. It occurs to him later that her ability to pick out newer scars means she can differentiate old from new, and is thus intimately familiar with the old. He’s not sure how to feel about that.)

It’s probably silly to worry about something so ridiculous. He’s not the only one in the world with scars—once, he and Al came to Risembool and were worriedly bewildered to find Winry with gauze wrapped thickly around her hand from an accident involving a blowtorch. He can only imagine how painful that have been. What scarring that came from the incident is small, though, and faded, but it joins a few other cuts and nicks she’s accrued over the years due to her profession. She has callouses over her hands, which makes sense, because one does not work as hard and unceasingly as Winry without your hands hardening to reflect that.

(The roughness of her hands is a constant, even as they change and lengthen and the fingers grow more graceful. If he closes his eyes, he imagines the way they move as she tinkers with screws and bolts, as she affixes outer casings or tightens bolts with screwdrivers, grease smudges on fingertips, how tightly she grips wrenches. But mostly he remembers how her eyes gleam when she does this, bright and vivid blue.)

Any scars she gets are retained almost exclusively below the elbow. Unlike him, she doesn’t have scarring all over her body, isn’t a patchwork and a tattered masterpiece of almost-dying like he is. The life she lives is simple and profoundly enjoyable, and he can’t imagine for the life of him why she puts it all on hold when he sweeps in through the door with his ugly, horrific markings and the mangled metal protruding from horrifically scarred stumps. He can’t understand how she can ask him strip bare and then not even flinch when he reveals some newly-healed wound that his skin will carry with him for a long, long time.

(Once, he fell asleep on the couch—it happens a lot—and woke slowly, his eyes closed but his consciousness slowly surfacing. Then he registered the rough warmth of fingertips tracing the scar tissue around his arm port, which must have been exposed by his shirt. The breathing was Winry’s—he’s not sure how he knew, but he knew, could hear a shadow of her cadence in the steady intervals of inhaling and exhaling.

He kept his eyes closed as he felt her draw closer. Felt the warmth of her breath against the scar. Had to fight the sudden outbreak of goosebumps that emerged on his shoulder blade, his collarbone, his chest. Hopefully, she wouldn’t notice how his breath sharpened.

“You idiot,” she mumbled, and what stayed with him long after was how tender she was on such a rough and unappealing part of him—how her touch was gentle like she was caressing a newly-bloomed flower.

He’s not sure why she would be so delicate. He’s not sure why he cares.)

Then again, Winry never seems to care about aesthetics unless it’s related to automail. And so far, she’s held true to that.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! I tried to keep the continuity vague on this one. Hope you enjoyed!


End file.
